Surely you have received or heard about at least one of these emails:
a) A foreign bank holds a large sum of money from a certain Mr. X who died from a tragic airplane crash. Mr. X left no heirs. Fortunately, you have the same surname as him. The bank now proposes a deal with you, wanting you to stand in as his next-of-kin. In return, you get to keep a portion of the money.
b) A government official from a foreign country needs your help in transferring a large sum of money. He then proposes to transfer to you account several millions of dollars in over-invoiced accounts into your personal bank account. You only need to fill up several forms and send it to him. You are promised a certain percentage of the amount after the transaction is completed.
c) You have won $5M from an online lottery. Your email address was said to have been extracted from over a hundred thousand entities listed online. To claim the money, you just need to email certain information with their claims officer.
These are just some of the variations of popular email scams. While we may laugh at the thought of us getting conned by these schemes, thousands have already been victimized by them and millions of dollars have been lost. The advance-fee fraud (such as letter B above) alone has been estimated to have caused over $32 billion in losses as of 2008.
But the more important question we should be thinking about is how they were able to get our email addresses. Apparently, these scammers get our addresses by collecting them from websites, buying them from businesses, or by simply guessing possible names on popular email hosts. Thus, whenever you are shopping online, registering for an account, or simply filling up a survey, there may be a chance that your personal information may be leaked out to persons not parties to the transaction.
There is really no concrete way to completely eliminate these problems. These security issues are likely to prevail, given that one of the essential foundations of the internet is the free flow of information. Hopefully, such flaws of the Internet will be cured as the internet users mature and learn how to carefully use the technology.
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